[Edu-sig] When to introduce OOP

[Chris Meyers]

Hi Tim,

I just completed teaching a 15 hour little survey course on Python 
at the community college here in Eugene. It went pretty well, 
particuarly since it was the first time for me with this material.

I tried to make the course sort of data-oriented. Concentrated on 
first simple data types, numbers and strings and then moved on to 
lists and dictionaries. Treated the rest of the language as just 
operators on the data, so introduced "for" along with lists, etc.
We mostly played with small pieces of code, often at the 
interactive prompt.

Near the end I introduced 2 larger programs. The first was strictly 
procedural, a tic-tac-toe that showed off functional decomposition 
pretty well. That was last week. In the last 3 hour class this week 
we first looked at object oriented stuff and then showed an OOP 
simulated card game. This game will be a chapter in the OBP book 
real soon now.

People seemed to have no problem with OOP this early. Some of it 
might be that they were already used to composite data with lists 
and dictionaries. Including things like nested lists etc.
So objects referencing other objects was ok. Tying methods to 
objects, no problem. Inheritance a little trickier but still ok.

My impression is that the two programs were about the same in 
complexity and size. But my students had to struggle more with the 
procedural one. There were a lot more smiles this week than last. 
I think maybe it's all about being able to map the code to a model 
in your head.

As Kirby said, you still got to use procedural code to stuff into 
the object methods. I vote for using OOP as early as you can and 
have them use it if they are writting programs. Set good habits 
early.

Chris Meyers



07/27/2001 8:21:27 PM, Timothy Wilson <wilson@visi.com> wrote:

>Hi everyone,
>
>I'm working on planning my Python course for this fall, and I'd 
like to get
>the group's advise on when I should introduce OOP. I work with 
Zope a lot
>and the OO paradigm is pretty deeply embedded there. I've really 
gotten to
>like it. (Not that I've mastered it. :-)
>
>Now I'm fully aware that Python is just as capable a procedural 
programming
>language as it is an OO one. I don't want to skip talking about 
that side of
>things, but OOP seems so prevalent in many areas that I'd like to 
get my
>students working with it as soon as possible.
>
>I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on this topic.
>
>-Tim
>
>--
>Tim Wilson      |   Visit Sibley online:   | Check out:
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